Oh my god, I am rich. Oh my god, I am rich.  So long suckers.

See what I got in the mail  The only confusion is about who the hell is giving me the money? Is it the Google Rediffmail Lottery or the esteemed GOOGLE GMAIL CORPORATION or perhaps its the SPRINGFIELD SCHOOL. I can’t even ask anyone as the mail is privileged and confidential and protected from disclosure. 

*refreshes the bank account summary page*

____________________________________________

Dear Winner

You have won a prize money of ( £500,000.00 GBP ) by Google Rediffmail Lottery in conjunction with the GOOGLE GMAIL CORPORATION.
How ever you will have to fill and submit this form to the events manager.

1. Full name…………..2. Contact Address……..
3. Age………………..4. Telephone Number…….
5. Sex………………..6. Occupation………….

(Contact Director Lottery Department)

Mr Ray Williams
Tell +448713159178
Email: gglclmsoffice@gmail.com

Note:  The information contained in this message may be privileged and confidential
and protected from disclosure.  If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or
an employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you
are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is
strictly prohibited.  If you have received this communication in error, please notify us
immediately by replying to the message and deleting it from your computer.

Thank you.
SPRINGFIELD SCHOOL DISTRICT 19

Abnam x
Its address Yek Irani Dar Pasokh by Dkhalt haye شیطنت Amesz این Dhendh Managed by the Constitution of the shrines آمریکایی der things داخلی کشورم)
این strona its address Hishdar هک می Chaudes

- Courtesy Google

I wonder what the text on the flag says.

When I was about 8 or 9, there was a large Gulmohar tree infront of my classroom. The tree had low hanging branches, perfect for kids to pretend they were Spiderman. Without the outer-under-wear, ofcourse. No funny masks either.

In a bout of such super-heroedness, during lunch, I was swinging away on the branches, locked in a fierce battle for world domination, with my friends. All super heroes, real or otherwise, outer-under-wear or not, have their arch nemesis. The main villain of this story was the school office clerk. He some how got wind of our super hero activites and we were summoned to the office, post lunch.

The school office was a large room in the main building, attached to a small storage room. The storage room was used to store school stationary and other equipment used in the school. It was a small and stuffy room. It was in this room where the group of, now slightly scared, super heroes found themselves locked.

We were locked for the remainder of the day. The thing I remember most about the locked up period is that we had a lot of fun. We had lots of props around us and the comedy acts never stopped. We hoped that the sounds did not carry outside and so our captors remain unaware of the merriment going on inside the tiny, semi-dark and stuffy room. You can lock up heroes but you can not lock up their spirits or something like that.

An hour after the school time was over, the door opened. We had heard the footsteps approaching and assumed a sufficiently stressed out and scared look. It was friday. We were allowed to leave with only one statement. “Please collect your TCs on Monday”. TCs (Transfer Certificates), for the uninitiated, is what you get when you either leave the school or are thrown out of it. In my mind, I went from being the prodigal son to the black sheep in 3.6 seconds. Beat that Ferrari.

I thought there was no way I could face my parents with this news (due to the aforementioned stupidity). So, I did what any normal 9 year old would do. I decided to run away from home.

A plan was hatched, I told my mother that there was a comedy competition in the Town hall and I was participating. I told her that the competition is on Sunday and rehersals on Saturday. I packed a few cloths for the “dress rehersals”. I had participated in contests in the Town Hall so the story did not make my mother suspicious. Off I went.

The plan included one other kid. Both of us met at the Town Hall. We picked up a road and decided to go till the next town. According to the milestone, it was 18 km away. The Jeep fare for going there was Rs. 2/- per head. We decided to save money and walk all the way. It started getting dark after about a couple of hours of walking and as Mr. Murphy had predicted, with darkness came a slight drizzle.

Now my partner in crime, who shall forever remain nameless *cough* Abhishek *cough*, was not fully sold on the idea of running away in the first place. I would like to believe it was my how_can_you_show_your_face_to_your_parents speech that pushed him off the proverbial edge. Soon after the drizzle, he started getting restless. He mumbled something about wanting to go back to mummy but continued the march forward. Soon enough the sounds of sobbing from left overtook the sounds of thunder from above. This was when I decided to head back.

It was pretty dark and raining. I am from that part of India where street lights mean fireflies. We started the long trek back. A few minutes later a Jeep heading back to town appeared on the road. This time we decided to not worry about the money.

The passengers of the Jeep looked pretty concerned on finding two kids in the middle of nowhere on a dark and rainy night. I gave them a story of trying to go to Aunt’s house, not being able to make it because of the rain and hence returning. Who cares if they were convinced or not. I was going home.

It was pretty late and I was sure my parents would be pretty worried by now. They were. I remember getting one tight slap and that was pretty much it. The topic never came up again. Until now, that is, when I was looking for a story for my funny blog

What’s the point of having a smart phone if you can’t jot down the priceless quote some one made, in the office meeting, for water cooler talk later, or perhaps a compilation of quotes for your blog.

With the number of choices available in the Android market, choosing the perfect note taking app for your Android phone has become a non trivial pursuit.

I have compiled a table of features for the popular notepad apps from the Android market, I have put the features that I thought would be useful.

I only tested the free apps, some of the following apps have paid versions which include more features.

Some applications have some other features worth mentioning that are not in the table. Here are some that I found note worthy

3Banana:

It has a good web interface. The web interface can be used while taking notes on the comp and it syncs with the phone app. It can read and store barcode data. User’s don’t need to create an account they can sign-in using their Google account. 3 Banana also supports location tagging this way your note will automatically contain context information.

AK Notepad:

AK Notepad comes bundled as an uninstallable applications in some of the custom Android ROMs. It is a pretty decent option if all you want to do is take text notes.

ColorNote:

The main USP of this application is that the notes can be color coded and sorted based on the color. Other than that this is a simple app for taking text notes.

Evernote:

Evernote is perhaps the best known name in this list. They don’t have a release version out for Android yet, so I tested the beta version that can be downloaded from their site. Evernote  definitely has best online presence amongst the listed apps. Their desktop app is too good to ignore. If you are a Windows or a Mac user then this is definitely worth a very serious look. Me, I am waiting for them to release a Linux version.

Foxnote:

This application is supposed to sync with Google Docs but I was unable to get it to work.

GDocs:

GDocs integrates pretty well with Google docs. It allows the user to download their documents from Google Docs and edit them. The editing can be done offline. Documents can be created offline and  can later be synced. If you use Google Docs then you should definitely give this application a try.

Note Everything:

This is a feature rich note taking application. Most of the features for which it says “no” in the table are available in the Pro version which has Photo notes, checklists, encryption, reminder etc. I did not try the Pro version.

Note Me:

Note Me has a slightly busy looking interface with lots icons at the bottom of the screen. It has filtering by tags and a send to calendar feature which is similar to the remainder feature that some other apps have.

Notepad:

This is plain vanilla  note taking app, it provides syncing through its own servers at http://pad.helicoid.net

Paint Note:

This is not a normal note taking application. This is meant for taking picture notes. You can open any picture from your album or SD Card, add notes to it and share it using one of the many photo sharing sites. You can also create your own drawings and share them in the same way.

Ultra Notes:

This is another feature rich application. It is one of the few application that support encryption. The home screen, by default, contains a list of folders which can be used to categorise the notes.

Wiki notes:

This is useful for creating wikis, all wiki words (text with more than one capital letter) become links to notes of that title.

Status note:

This is another app which is not a simple note taking app. This puts an editable note in the status bar.

OI Notebook:

Open Intents (OI) have a pretty large suite of apps for Android platform. Their note taking app, OI Notebook, is a pretty decent application. The USP of OI Notebook is that it integrates well with other OI products like OI Voice Notes, OI Safe, providing additional functionality.

Update: Evernote is out of beta now. I use evernote and ultranotes on my phone.

What is not mentioned anywhere is the fact that the Indian version of HTC Magic is one of the few models which is completely locked, not to the carrier, but software installation wise. The phone contains the carrier unlock code right on the box. I have been using my old Vodafone number since the purchase.

Now my whole purpose of buying a smart phone was using the Google services, customising the phone no end and installing and experimenting with lots of software. The phone was a major disappointment. It did not have the Google app suite, it did not have Android market, it had no option of installing any software. How Airtel can advertise GPS as one of the phone’s features without any map application is beyond me. Needless to say I was pretty upset and desperate.

I looked around the web for ways to rectify this. I went through many blog and forum posts about rooting the phone and decided to try it. Then came the second surprise, this version of the Magic contained what is called a perfected SPL, which means rooting was not going to be that simple.

Then I found the Unlokr‘s guide to Root the HTC Magic in one click , this worked perfectly. After that I tried 4 different ROMs from the xda developers, which are basically customised versions of the OS, they were all quite good but I finally settled for the MyHero ROM, this  contained the HTC sense UI, which I liked. Welcome Android

After getting a brand new and completely unlocked OS, I downloaded the Android Market Enabler, this allowed me to access the other versions of the market. After about a month, I am still checking out a good number of apps everyday. Stay tuned for app reviews.

I have been using Windows 7 rc for around 3 months now, a little before it started getting all the good press. Installation was easy, mostly because I installed it on a separate disk so there was no issue of it wanting to be on the first primary partition of the disk. I had that trouble with Vista which kept on giving the very helpful message “Your disk does not meet the prerequisites” without giving any kind of hint as to what those prerequisites were. I had nothing to backup and restore so I side stepped that landmine.

I must admit that my experience with this brand new Microsoft OS has been pretty good. It is definitely slicker and faster than Vista. There are fewer application compatibility issues.

Here are some of the things that I like, they may not be the big killer features or major technological breakthroughs but I find them very useful.

• New taskbar: The new taskbar has got a good amount of media attention. I hate having too many windows on my taskbar, it causes searching for a particular one take that much longer. This is one of the reasons I absolutely love the multiple desktops that are available in Gnome and others. This feature in itself might be a copy of the Mac Dock but it is, undoubtedly, immensely useful. One more thing that I love about it is the fact that when you have multiple windows of the same application, hovering the mouse pointer over now square enclosed icon on the toolbar, shows all the instance windows and you can then click on a particular instance to bring it to top. You can, also, close a particular instance right from there and hovering the mouse on one of the instances brings it forward for as long as the mouse pointer is on it, great for checking score on cricinfo or some such thing. This has become a feature that I have started missing whenever I am on Linux.
• New Start menu: The start menu has received a face lift. The search box there, although not an original idea again, is pretty useful. When the mouse is hovered over one of the applications in the list the right panel of the menu changes to a list of files recently opened using that application. Another feature which cuts down time and clicks required to do mundane and repetitive tasks.
• Another feature that I have started using a lot is maximizing a window to cover half of the screen horizontally. This is done by dragging the title bar of the window out of either sides of the screen. This causes the window to cover exactly the left or the right half of the screen. This becomes very useful while copying stuff from one window to another or comparing some stuff etc. For people whose text editors don’t have vertical split this can be a really useful substitute.
• The system bar has been now been minimised and converted to an upwards pointing arrow. More space on the task bar, Very good.
• Internet is definitely faster than on Ubuntu. Perhaps an upgraded network stack. I have tried disabling IPv6, using OpenDNS, dns caching and multiple configuration changes on Ubuntu. While they have helped, the speed is still a good amount less than what I get on windows. There was a bug on bind which seems to have been patched but the problem persists.
• Microsoft Office: This is a _huge_ difference. Open Office is not even in the same zip code. Trust me, I have been doing documentation for past 6 months   . I have tried crossover, while it works reasonably well, it still can’t provide the integration that one gets with almost every thing when running office natively.
• The new version of MS Paint is pretty useful. Lots of changes and Microsoft did not make a mistake hiring the guys that wrote it.

Now for the gripes

• Lack of multiple desktops: I have absolutely no idea why this is not there. I find it incredibly useful and time saving, productivity increasing etc. Just throw all your IM clients etc in one window, mail clients in another etc. and only keep one group of work related windows on one desktop, so that when you are working you don’t get any popup notifications and Alt Tabbing just becomes incredibly easier.
• Synaptic: This is a killer, although underrated, feature of Ubuntu. All applications in one place. Don’t have to worry about updating individual applications, drivers etc. Microsoft definitely should look at something like the Windows Marketplace implementation for this purpose.
• Mouse copy: This is the feature that I miss most. In X selecting some text using the mouse automatically copies and can be pasted using the middle click. I now have to do every copy operation twice on windows, when the middle click paste fails then I realise I am on windows, I curse, and then go back and use Ctrl-C Ctrl-V.

All in all a pretty good offering from the Microsoft stable, I have already placed a bet on it capturing 40% market share in 6 – 8 months.

One monk, more compassionate than the other, picked up the woman and carried her across the street, setting her down on the other side of the road. He returned to his companion and they continued down the road for some minutes until the second monk chided the first with the remark, “You really shouldn’t have done that.”

“Done what?”

“Why, you contaminated yourself by touching that impure woman.”

“Oh, are you still carrying her? I put her down on the other side of the street.”